ADAM TAVEL

DAEDALUS IN HIS DELIRIUM
Dean Meeker print, 1976

the gone mind singing as it goes sings serene
deformities of wings, a parched bronze noon,
shoreline foam receding with the kelp
it spat :: it sings I had no sons, no hazed altitudes
to glide, it was a carver’s workshop dream, all of it,
boredom’s secret theatre, the queen’s drawn face,
blood flashed on the interminable cobbled wall
of a maze :: I have stared too long at sawdust
that furred my arms in moon-glow :: it all fell
from my fingers, a hollow ox made for the whim
of some brat dizzy with lust, imagining her delinquent
fervor too :: whoever drinks the sea burns brighter
with thirst :: I cannot track island gulls for long before
they blur to one gull subtracted :: the wind bore me
like a dune, crabs skittering sideways, whoever
insults the sky becomes its cloud :: there never was a boy
who found me, ambered, fleeing, who came weeping
down his tunic, an orphaned greediness :: I never carved
a cypress gull his tiny hands could soar, make it caw,
he made it, I made him up, he was a wretch made to make
echoes past my corridor, chased by his own tongue

PEOPLE SCRAMBLING TO GET AWAY FROM A PERSON WITH LEPROSY
Richard Tennant Cooper, c. 1912

our figure here whose face is rotting off
aghasts :: like us the balconed peasants glare
into the scene performing their disgust ::
egads :: gadzooks :: purpureus her skin
in rags she plods her staff and shakes a bell
to warn another village hissing through
its cavities :: the fruit stand’s quaint remains
fester sun-stained :: one bucket spills its guts
into the shadow of a trough :: and all
the jeerers sprawled across the steps recoiling
from the leper’s ding ignore the naked babe
left in the street to suck its thumb and stare ::
veridical our mob is absolute ::
each mother turns away her empty arms